“I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.”

Lord Bertrand Russell’s famous (or infamous if you prefer) 1927 essay “Why I Am Not A Christian” is one of the “classics” of “atheist literature” and one that is still likely to be read to this very day by budding unbelievers trying to inch themselves out of the church pew (It was just such a rite of passage for me, a religious skeptic by the age of twelve).

Russell felt that religion itself was “principal enemy of moral progress.” Saying something like that took a lot of guts back them!

In part, due to his reputation as a “freethinker” and for his controversial positions on matters of sexual morality, Lord Russell, who is today regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest minds and humanitarian activists, was judicially declared “unfit” to teach philosophy at the College of the City of New York in 1940. The great philosopher was defended by a host of intellectuals, including John Dewey and Albert Einstein (Einstein’s famous line that “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds ... ” came from his open letter in support of Lord Russell).

In the clip below, taken from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s archives, Bertrand Russell gives a short but sweet answer to the question he posed himself over 80 years ago, in what is probably today his best-known popular work.

The website Answers in Genesis whose motto is “Beliving it. Defending it. Proclaiming it” erected this rather disturbing billboard of a “non-believer” child pointing a gun, at YOU his parent who is presumably about to die because you raised your kid WRONG, communist pinko!

Dr. Terence Meaden was surprised when a piece of toast he was about to eat in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, England, earlier this month, seemed to depict the formation of the planet:

He could barely withhold his excitement.

“I was having breakfast when this piece of ciabatta toast got burnt,” he said. “Suddenly I was aware that the pattern of light and darkness across the toast resembled what could have been a visible manifestation of primeval events at the time that planet Earth was forming four and a half billion years ago.”

Apparently Dr. Meaden was so moved by the experience that he buttered and ate the ciabatta toast after photographing it. He should have sold it on eBay! What was he thinking?!

“It is exciting because this piece of toast was absolutely genuine. No trickery. It happened, just like that” said Dr. Meaden

BBC News posted this wonderfully neutral report about a Summer camp for parents who would prefer that their children not be fed religious propaganda.

It’s hard to imagine something like this on US news. If a story like this was on Fox News, they’d probably make it out like only “bad parents” would send their kids to a camp like this and turn it into some form of child abuse.

For the “centrepiece” of its scientific approach to religion the camp asks its participants to search for two invisible unicorns.

The unicorns cannot be seen or heard, tasted, smelt or touched, they cannot escape from the camp and they eat nothing.

The only proof of their existence is contained in an ancient book handed down over “countless generations.”